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At the time though, you can imagine the news was devastating, and it was hard to focus. All any of us could do was to concentrate on our own internal commitments to the race and do the best we could without him, and for him.

After a week of being in the bunch, I was beginning to think about taking the green jersey to Paris and maybe winning a stage in it at last. So it was almost comforting to come second again on stage 13, this time to Greg Van Avermaet.

On stage 16, fed up with losing sprint stages, I tried my luck on a mountain stage. There were two second-category climbs on it. Second? That sounded like my kind of category, and it had a downhill plunge to the finish in gap in the Alps, which I thought would suit me.

I came in second.

There was one stage for sprinters left, the glorious pageant of a gallop up the Champs-Elysées and a hero’s welcome in Paris for the winner. I was determined not to come second. I didn’t. I came in seventh.

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Did you know that Jerusalem artichokes aren’t artichokes at all? And that they don’t come from Jerusalem either? Amazing, no? They are actually very tall plants that look like sunflowers, but have a large, gnarly tuber in their roots that looks like a big, long piece of fresh ginger that you might pick up in a more enlightened supermarket. “What about the Jerusalem bit?” I hear you cry. Well, it seems English-speaking settlers in the New World misunderstood their French-speaking counterparts when they described a sunflower as a “girasol” and the name was born.